New York Upstate of Mind: Road Trip Diary 2026 Day 1 :Let It Eat and Hope for the Best: Inside the Bullpen Minds of Carrillo and Lambert

If you hang around enough minor league bullpens long enough, you start to realize they are a lot like college dorm rooms, except with radar guns, higher stakes, and a stronger likelihood that someone can throw a baseball through a brick wall.

That pretty much sums up Syracuse Mets relievers Alex Carrillo and Ryan Lambert, two guys whose journeys intersected long enough for me to sit down with them and let the conversation roam from international glory to viral fame to the simple act of trying to throw a baseball past a guy with a bat without completely losing your mind.

Carrillo opened like a man who had already seen enough baseball to know that perspective is everything, especially after the World Baseball Classic added a new chapter to his story. “There’s no experience like it,” he said, with the tone of someone who had just come back from a trip that permanently raised the bar for everything else in life. “I don’t have much to compare it to. They say it’s better than a World Series, like championship game, game seven, but I have yet to experience that and I hope to God I get to experience it soon.”

That is a sentence that should probably be stitched onto every minor league clubhouse wall, right under the motivational poster of a bald eagle and the words “GRIND.”

For Carrillo, the WBC was not just baseball with flags. It was something more personal, more complicated, and a lot more meaningful than simply changing uniforms. “Playing for the country, I mean, for me personally, it’s playing for my family, playing for my family back home,” he said. “Obviously my family’s all in California. I still have family in Mexico. I haven’t talked to them in years. My parents keep in contact with them, but it’s more playing for my family and for the name on my back instead of… and it’s obviously playing for the country, but it’s more for the family than anything.”

That “and it’s obviously playing for the country” hangs there like a guy who showed up late to the meeting but still wants credit for attendance.

Then there is Ryan Lambert, who enters the conversation like a man who has been told his entire life that he throws very, very hard and is now slowly realizing that people expect him to continue doing exactly that, forever, under pressure, with radar guns recording every existential decision.

Lambert has already had what we might politely call a “viral résumé,” which is baseball speak for “people on the internet have strong opinions about you for reasons involving gloves, eggs, and velocity readings that look like highway speed limits.”

When asked about the attention, he does not try to escape it. He just shrugs in sentence form. “I mean, it’s pressure for sure,” he said, “but it’s just like, if you think about it, then it’ll add more and more. But if you just go about it like, you know, I’m here for a reason and I play for fun, then it kind of takes that pressure off. Because I’m here because I love baseball and I have fun doing it.”

That is either the healthiest mental approach to professional sports or the opening line of a documentary called “Why I Threw 100 and Still Had Anxiety.”

Lambert’s awareness of how he is perceived is part of the modern pitching experience, where broadcasters can turn a routine bullpen arm into a mythological creature based solely on velocity and a uniform number. He recalled hearing an announcer speculate about his number during a game broadcast, which is something that would make most people reconsider ever wearing clothes with numbers again.

“What goes through your head?” he said of hearing that kind of chatter. “Just that I throw hard and I gotta live up to that name, you know, that flame throwing gas I throw. It just kind of reminds me to give my all out there.”

If baseball had trading cards with quotes on the back, that one would sell out immediately in middle school cafeterias.

Of course, throwing hard is the easy part. The hard part is everything that comes after throwing hard, including throwing hard again, but in the strike zone, and preferably not into orbit.

Lambert has already learned the brutal truth of modern bullpen life, which is that velocity is both a blessing and a legal obligation. “It’s pressure for sure,” he admitted, “but if you just go about it like, I’m here for a reason and I play for fun, then it kind of takes that pressure off.”

Which is a sentence that sounds like it was written by someone trying to convince both himself and his fastball to stay calm.

He also described the classic reliever paradox, the one where trying too hard to be perfect makes you worse at everything, including being imperfect in a controlled way. “If I try to take it off and try to locate, then it won’t locate,” he said. “But if I just let it eat and not worry about it, then I’ll locate much better.”

That is baseball logic in its purest form, which is to say it makes perfect sense until you try to explain it to your uncle at Thanksgiving.

Carrillo nodded in agreement with a version of that same philosophy, but from a pitcher’s perspective that has learned to detach velocity from identity. “For me personally, I don’t worry about Velo,” he said, using the kind of abbreviation that suggests he has mentally filed radar gun readings under “things that can ruin your life if you stare at them too long.” “There’s days where I’m going to go out there, I’m going to sit 98, 99. But there’s also like my last outing, I sat 96, 97, because I don’t worry about Velo.”

That is not a sentence you hear in everyday life unless you are either a pitcher or someone describing their credit score.

Carrillo’s real adjustment, though, is philosophical rather than mechanical. “I’m more out there just trying to attack the guy,” he said. “Because if I worry, and that’s like you brought up the pressure aspect of it, I came up as the sort of the flamethrower, blah blah blah whatever. And that got in my head to where, oh I need to throw hard instead of pitching.”

That “blah blah blah whatever” is doing an incredible amount of emotional labor in that sentence.

In the end, both pitchers land in the same place, which is somewhere between controlled chaos and organized aggression, the official state of all successful relievers since the invention of the bullpen cart.

As Lambert put it, “Go out there and attack, and that’s all we can do.”

Which is probably the simplest and most accurate description of pitching ever spoken, right after “please don’t hit this baseball” and “I hope my elbow survives the week.”

For all the technology, analytics, biomechanics, and pitching labs floating around baseball these days, sometimes the most important thing a young pitcher can hear still comes from a veteran sitting a few lockers away after a bad night. Carrillo and Lambert both lit up talking about the advice that stuck with them most during their Mets journey, and neither answer involved spin rate. For Carrillo, it came after one of those outings every reliever experiences, the kind where the inning feels six hours long and the baseball suddenly develops trust issues. Mets starter Sean Manaea pulled him aside afterward and reminded him that every pitcher goes through it at some point in the game. More importantly, Manaea told him to trust his stuff. Carrillo admitted he already knew that intellectually, but hearing it from a veteran who had survived the battles himself “helped ease the pain.” Lambert found his guidance from veteran Carl Edwards Jr., who noticed that when Lambert started overthinking after losing the strike zone, the best solution was not to guide the ball or nibble, but to rear back and throw his hardest fastball. The idea was simple: stop thinking and compete. It is advice Lambert has embraced, and both pitchers agreed Edwards had a meaningful impact on them. Which makes perfect sense because baseball wisdom is often delivered less like a TED Talk and more like a guy in spikes casually telling you, “Hey, trust your stuff and quit trying to be a physics equation.”

In a game increasingly defined by data, velocity, spin rate, launch angle, and whatever else the next spreadsheet category turns out to be, Carrillo and Lambert offer something refreshingly old fashioned. Two pitchers trying to figure it out, one radar gun reading at a time, both learning that the real trick is not throwing harder or thinking less or even “letting it eat.”

It is surviving long enough in professional baseball to tell the story afterward, preferably without the story involving too many eggs, too much internet attention, or a fastball that still has somewhere to be at 100 miles per hour.

Here is the full interview: